[Note: For the most comprehensive listing of all the new BlueDragon 7.1
features, please review the What's New in BlueDragon 7.1 PDF document.]

When deploying BlueDragon 7.1 on IIS 7 (IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, or on IIS 7.5 on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2), the new IIS Manager for IIS 7 is used to configure and administer BlueDragon; this replaces the browser-based administration console used in previous versions of BlueDragon.

Some high-level features:

1. BlueDragon administration and configuration is fully integrated with IIS 7 and ASP.NET.
   
2. BlueDragon administration and configuration can be done globally, and per individual web site and web application.
   
3. The new IIS 7 administration and configuration system allows very fine-grained control of delegation of permissions by the server administration to individual web site and web application administrators.
   
4. The new IIS 7 Manager supports remote access to the server by individual web site and web application administrators, with feature delegation controlled by the server administrator.
   
5. The new ASP.NET and IIS 7 integrated request pipeline can be used to optionally allow the onRequestStart and onRequestEnd events handlers of Application.cfc to be run for all content served by IIS 7 - such as static HTML files, GIF and JPG images, ASP.NET .aspx pages, etc... ..and not just CFML pages.
   

IIS 7 Native Administration

As illustrated in the figures above and below, BlueDragon 7.1 installs a set of extensions to the IIS Manager for configuring BlueDragon. There are help pages available for each extension, though their use will be readily apparent to anyone familiar with ColdFusion or earlier versions of BlueDragon. See the Deploying CFML on ASP.NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework document for additional information.

IIS 7 Native Configuration

BlueDragon 7.1 takes advantage of the new integrated configuration model of ASP.NET and IIS 7 to store all BlueDragon configuration data within the IIS 7 applicationHost.config and web.config files.

Benefits of Native Integration with IIS 7:

1. All IIS 7, ASP.NET, and BlueDragon configuration data is now stored in the same plain-text XML-based configuration files. This makes it very easy to replicate configuration data across multiple servers in a cluster, or to copy configuration data from a staging server to a production server.
   
2. BlueDragon can be configured independently for every web site and web application (this feature was available in earlier versions of BlueDragon, but is made even easier with this new feature).
   
3. IIS 7 configuration files exist in an inheritance hierarchy, allowing you to configure global settings within applicationHost.config and then override or modify those settings for individual web sites or web applications via web.config files. BlueDragon 7.1 now takes advantage of this inheritance hierarchy.
   
4. All of the IIS 7 configuration and administration tools can be used to configure and administer BlueDragon: http://www.iis.net/getstarted/PowerfulAdministrationTools

IIS 7 Native Integrated Request Pipeline

BlueDragon 7.1 also takes advantage of the new ASP.NET and IIS 7 integrated request pipeline to optionally allow the onRequestStart and onRequestEnd event handlers of Application.cfc to be run for all content served by IIS 7 - such as static HTML files, GIF and JPG images, ASP.NET .aspx pages, etc. and not just CFML pages.

The BlueDragon 7.1 installer gives you the option to configure the onRequestStart and onRequestEnd event handlers to be invoked for:

1. Only CFML pages (this is the default for backwards
   compatibility with BlueDragon 7.0.1 and ColdFusion);
2. CFML and ASP.NET pages; or,
3. All content, including static files and images.

BlueDragon 7.1: More Information

For the most comprehensive listing of all the new BlueDragon 7.1 features, please review the What's New in BlueDragon 7.1 PDF document.